Search form

.NET Framework 4.5 is an in-place upgrade for .NET Framework 4.0. What this means is that it's impossible to have both 4.0 and 4.5 installed. If you want to run just a single application on 4.5, you must run all applications written for 4.0 on 4.5 as well. This places some very strong constraints on how compatible such an upgrade must be.

Ever since this was announced, a number of people expressed their concern that the required level of compatibility is not going to be achieved. I'm certainly one of the people who feel an in-place upgrade with so many changes is not such a great idea, to say the least.

Now I'm on 4.5, and I've run into an incompatibility myself. One that makes every single GUI I've built and tested in .NET over the years have a fairly annoying quirk on machines running 4.5. Read on for details.

I've been using TrueCrypt's whole disk encryption together with Acronis TrueImage Home partition images for quite a while now, and have recently performed a restore. I wasn't sure whether the restore was going to work, and it wasn't completely smooth, so read on if you're considering a similar set up.

I'm used to consistent terminology. I'm used to a particular concept being referred to in the same way throughout. But in Git, the same set of very closely related concepts can be referred to by lots of very different names. Let me show you the worst example I've come across yet.

Suppose you are presented with a game. You are given a red and a blue envelope with some money in each. You are allowed to ask an independent party to open both envelopes, and tell you the ratio of blue:red amounts (but not the actual amounts). If you do, the game master replaces the envelopes, and the amounts inside are chosen by him using the same algorithm as before.

You ask the independent observer to check the amounts a million times, and find that half the time the ratio is 2 (blue has twice as much as red), and half the time it's 0.5 (red has twice as much as blue). At this point, the game master discloses that in fact, the way he chooses the amounts mathematically guarantees that these probabilities hold.

Which envelope should you pick to maximize your expected wealth?

It may seem surprising, but with this set-up, the game master can choose to make either red or blue have a higher expected amount of money in it, or make the two the same. Asking the independent party as described above will not help you establish which is which. This is the surprising part and is, in my opinion, the crux of the two envelopes problem.

If you run JungleDisk 2.x on Windows 7, the local drive letter mounting will likely fail with an xDriveMapFailed (49) error. The fix is fairly easy to apply (but fairly tricky to figure out, hence this post).

Step 1: Enable the WebClient service.

The simplest way to do this is to locate the WebClient service in the Services list. Mine was set to Manual start and was disabled. If you prefer command lines, just run net start WebClient.